Religion(s) and the Enlightenment

Abstract

Despite its long-standing reputation for skepticism and irreverence, the Enlightenment took religion quite seriously. Historians have long recognized this fact, and have often represented the intellectual history of the eighteenth century in terms of the struggle between religious faith and philosophical skepticism. One common view of the period holds that religious dogmatism and intolerance, memorably condemned by Voltaire as l’Infâme, served as the negative pole against which the positive Enlightenment ideals of secularism, reason, and tolerance were articulated. Nearly a century ago, Ernst Cassirer characterized this view (which he did not entirely share) by writing, “French Encyclopedism declares war openly on religion,” accusing it of “having been an eternal hindrance to intellectual progress.” Around the same time, Carl Becker argued that the eighteenth-century philosophes sought to recast the “heavenly city” imagined by church fathers such as St. Augustine into a vision of a terrestrial utopian future. A generation later, Peter Gay described the philosophes as “modern pagans,” who “used their classical learning to free themselves from their Christian heritage.” For such scholars, the historical signifi cance of the Enlightenment lay in its break with religious tradition and embrace of “modernity”, defi ned primarily by secularism and rationality. This interpretation still holds considerable currency today and continues to inspire signifi cant contemporary scholarship. Jonathan Israel has recently sought to complicate the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion by positing a difference between a “moderate” mainstream Enlightenment, which sought to reconcile reason and faith and to reform the pillars of existing society rather than destroy them, and what he calls the “radical” Enlightenment, inspired by Spinoza and by the erudite libertinism of the seventeenth century, which “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely.” While Israel differs from predecessors such as Cassirer, Becker, and Gay in casting the most prominent French philosophes as moderates rather than radicals, and characterizing the intellectual landscape of the eighteenth century in terms of a three-way struggle rather than a binary one, he shares their general contention that the